


flying towards a limitless world

by daekie



Category: Library of Ruina (Video Game), Lobotomy Corporation (Video Game)
Genre: Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, F/F, Gen, Post-Floor Realization, baby's first attempt at anything even RESEMBLING non-established romance, post-core suppression, these women have TRAUMA but they are going to BOND ANYWAYS if i have any say in it (AND I DO)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 14:47:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29386524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daekie/pseuds/daekie
Summary: It might take her a long time -- but maybe that’s what being a better person is.  Work, and will, and time.  And maybe -- the desire to find something that makes you happy.Two different snapshots of Hod and Gebura's relationship: before the fall of Lobotomy Corporation, and after the rise of the library.
Relationships: Gebura/Hod (Lobotomy Corporation)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	flying towards a limitless world

**Author's Note:**

> Written for @yangstablook for the Lobotomy Corporation / Library of Ruina Gift Exchange! **#LCLORVDAY2021**

Nowadays it’s always cold in the Training Department. Probably. The good thing about her body being like - like this, Hod thinks, is that she doesn’t really... get cold, anymore? It’s always strange, what she remembers feeling, what she no longer can. It’s not like she can ask the Manager about it, and couldn’t even if she wanted to; he spends most of his days out of his office down in Atziluth, doing god-knows-what with the Sephirah down there. 

They’re scary! They’re really very terrifying, Hokma and Binah. If Hod squints just right, if she thinks and focuses, she can almost see the Perception Filter that the Manager must see: a tall, imposing woman in black and gold, with absolutely nothing in her flat gaze but a murderous sort of _lack_ . (Hod ‘blinks’ and it goes away. They’re all boxes. They’ve all _been_ boxes. But if she thinks about it just right and slides her thoughts at the right angle, she can go back to not really being conscious of that fact, the way she was before her Core Suppression; she can blink and not have the strange, transient feeling of knowing she has no eyelids to blink with. She can acknowledge herself as the self she is, nowadays, but it doesn’t mean she’s forgotten how to be the self that the Manager thought she was.)

‘Scary’ isn’t really a relative thing, either. She tries -- she tries not to talk to the Atziluth Sephirah if she can, she does, because there’s just something strange about them. Never mind the fact they’ve been half-dormant all these days until recently, and some of her employees were transferred down there and she _worries_ about not seeing them anymore. The Manager is competent nowadays, more competent than he was on those first stretch of days where her temper started growing thin until she lashed out - helplessly, selfishly, even then waiting passively in the wings for days and weeks (and rewound _months_ , the ever-cautious Manager waiting and waiting and biding his time _)_ until the time came to work through it and she wound tentacles through the air vents and watched the dull-eyed employees move like ghosts through their work -- which, anyways, that competency means that anyone outside of Asiyah never really makes their way up to the top layer anymore unless something goes very terribly wrong. 

(Things like Ordeals, mostly. Dawns and Noons? Not so much. But for Dusks and those few rare Midnights, employees she doesn’t know by heart come sprinting through her halls, barely a word to her or each other as the Manager’s calls come through.) Sometimes employees come in for their first day or two, she sends them over to work on HEs until priorities change, and then they’re down to Briah. And then maybe beyond Briah, Hod doesn’t know, she doesn’t supervise arrangements down there.

And, okay, maybe this is all rambling...! But the thing Hod’s mind has settled on to contemplate this hour is -- it’s cold. Or it’s breezy room-temperature, at least. She knows this not because of the thermostats and those numbers, but because the Snow Queen’s chamber gushes freezing air out every time someone opens it into the corridor, and half the facility has her crystals on their cheek. She knows this because of the way employees talk, and because she can see the way that peoples’ breath fogs up in front of their mouths. As a machine, filled with oil and Cognito and not-quite-blood, this is something she can know but can’t _know_ anymore. 

If she was human, if she was Michelle, she would have hated it. She always used to get cold so quickly, always used to shake and shiver in the testing labs (kept chilly, always chilly) and dismiss any inquiries about _are you cold_ with _n-no, really, I’m - I’m fine! I’m not too cold_ because she wanted to be below notice. Especially in the end - she wanted to be below notice. Because Elijah was dead, and Enoch was dead, and Giovanni was dead, and Gabriel was dead, and _Carmen_ was - Carmen was --

Abruptly, Hod doesn’t want to think about being Michelle anymore. 

Which is - it’s good timing, actually, it’s _perfect_ timing; there’s the buzz of an incoming message from the Manager. Not unusual, with the workday starting soon, but perfectly timed to knock her out of her funk. “Hod - Employee Summer from Training is going to be switching assignments with Employee Haru from Discipline. Can you take care of the paperwork? I have something I need to do.”

Frankly, she doesn’t know what he needs to do, and she doesn’t want to know. Probably something to do with those unsettling Atziluth Sephirah and whatever missions they’re sending him on. But Hod’s not rude, so she thinks-about-smiling and says “Of course, Manager! I’ll get right on it.” and bustles herself off to Information first -- employee files, and then she needs to make sure Gebura is aware of it and have her acknowledge the transfer, and then she needs to get Summer (...and Haru? No, that should be Gebura’s job, but... she might check on it, just in case; Haru worked in Training for a day or two, back in the start - and if she’s coming up again now she’s probably being contemplated for Captaincy) aware and make sure all the equipment and lockers are swapped before the start of the day.

Step by step, of course. Hod does like her routines, her orders of business. It’s like making a training program: it needs to be easy-to-follow, rigorous but not _too_ rigorous, and reasonably within her means to achieve. 

Yesod is easy enough to deal with, since nowadays employees swap around with enough frequency that he’s familiar with all the names and faces; he hands the papers over and she waves as she goes. (It makes her wonder, a little. She was shut down for it, but -- his Meltdown was so much kinder than hers. Direct interface with the systems, and all he did was glitch the monitors out to hell. Does it mean she’s more ruthless than he is, that she went straight to gas and poison and weakening until employees’ eyes were only half-open, not even awake enough for self-defense? But then again - ruthless isn’t a terrible thing to be. If you want a future to be better, you need to _fight_ for it. And now that she has the will to be a better person, not just the want, she can fight for it.)

And when it comes to ruthless -- that’s something Gebura’s never been lacking, when she needs it, and even when she doesn’t. For... enough of a while, Disciplinary has been the department the Manager gravitates to when something needs _killing_ . Not that Abnormalities die. But if they did -- Hod has no doubt Gebura and her team would’ve killed those who breach twenty times over, at the least. 

The first time Hod ever made her way down to Disciplinary, at least that she remembers, she waited almost ten minutes to speak to Gebura. The entire thing was almost terrifying; Gebura snapping and shouting, covered in blood and ichor and who-knows-what, the department members ruthlessly following her orders - Hod was so scared that she stuttered and trembled the entire time, and every time she stuttered Gebura just _loomed_ , and that just made it _worse_ until by the time she left Disciplinary she was on the verge of tears.

Now that she remembers she was Michelle, once, it’s different. _Michelle’s_ clearest memory of Kali isn’t of the Red Mist, the feared warrior; the first time she ever saw her, Kali had two little children hiding behind her legs and her shoulders set like an impassable wall. She felt brave, even seen through the window, even without knowing what she was saying. Righteous. Stalwart. Michelle thought she knew what Fixers were like, but Kali was working without payment or promise because of her belief, and something in Michelle shied away from it and whispered _I could never be like that, I could never be like her, I could never be brave_.   
Kali? Kali was fearless, and righteous, and she would have fought to the death to defend the things she loved. (And she did. The knowledge of it is a dulled thing, but Hod remembers that much in a terrible third-person kind of way.)

Some of that is in Gebura too, now. Not all of it, but some; the same way some of Michelle rests in her. The Sephirah are graves, each and every one of them, but maybe that doesn’t have to be a bad thing? She’d like to think she’s grown, now, compared to Michelle, who was terrified and barely understood the horror she was about to cause, and couldn’t -- she created the greatest external threat. And she’ll never know if without that call, without the information she passed along, they all might have lived.  
It’s unlikely. Hod wants to tell herself it was all her fault, Michelle’s fault, but - some of it wasn’t. Carmen was already wasting away, then, eating herself up from the inside with invisible rot, the same way Ayin’s eyes had gone from steel-strong to fever-bright with the weight of his vision. But she’ll never know. 

But she’s just distracting herself, really. Someday soon she’ll sit down and really think about Michelle, a ghost under her skin, but now is not the _time_ for that, so - Hod steels herself and enters Disciplinary.

It’s -- still a lot like it was. Crimson and terrifying, and she almost trembles before she gets it under control. With the workday not started properly yet, the floor is free of agents, the only human presence here the clerks chattering to each other; two of them salute her half-out of sync with a stumbled “Miss Hod! Hello!” and she waves _back_ , she’s not a monster.  
“Alpha9! Gamma2! Good morning.” She knows their ‘names’ the same way the Manager does; their ID cards broadcast it to the system, and being the way she is, she can just read it right out of thin air. “...Do you know where Gebura is? I need to give her some files.”  
“She’s down by the King of Greed’s Containment Unit!” Hod isn’t actually quite sure where that is without checking the system, not off the top of her head; and Gamma2 must be able to read _something_ like that out of the way she shifts, because they gesture towards the hallway leading to the stairs down. “Lower level, closer to the main room.”  
“Thank you.” She hurries off, then, and the two clerks get back to whatever their business was.

Down the hallway, past the containment units -- down the stairs, closer to the main room -- and there, next to the right containment unit, the sound of shimmering already in the air as the Qliphoth Deterrence starts to lighten, is Gebura. It’s actually been a while since Hod saw her! Before both of their Core Suppressions, at any rate, so she’s never actually _seen_ Gebura without the perception filter setting her left-of-center and making her remember them all as people.

... As a box, Gebura is still very intimidating. 

But Hod steels herself and forges on ahead. She reminds herself, again, that she has the will to be a better person now -- but that means nothing if she won’t work at it. And making sure Gebura knows she’s not afraid and useless means something, to her. (It means more than just ‘something’. The idea of Gebura not thinking she’s worthless makes something light blossom inside her, roughly around where her chest might be, and it’s a feeling she doesn’t understand. They’ve never really talked, so why...?)

“Gebura!” That’s the first part of the conversation, to get attention; Hod does wait until Gebura’s turned a little towards her, and then she keeps going. “The Manager is exchanging two of our employees, and he wanted me to handle it directly.” No interruptions yet. That’s probably a good thing. “Summer from Training is going to be part of Disciplinary now, and Haru from your team is moving up to Training, so --”

  
“I know.” Gebura cuts Hod off, turning all the way around so they’re eye-to-eye; the weight of her presence is a force to be reckoned with, but Hod won’t be deterred. Her voice is as sharp as it’s always been. It feels strange, to hear that voice coming out of that body; if she squints-and-thinks, Hod can see Gebura-the-woman, scarred and fierce. If this is anything, it’s a dismissal: _I know, fuck off_.

  
“If you know,” Hod continues after a second of pausing, “then you’re alright with me getting Haru’s files and leaving a message for her, so that the Manager doesn’t have to spend time doing it, aren’t you? Because,” and this is unexplored territory, but she keeps going, “you don’t usually hand off reassignments directly, so it’s more efficient to do it this way.” 

The moment where Gebura realizes Hod’s not just going to roll over like a scared little mouse is palpable. It’s not that _veneer_ of respect that used to pass between them, rotten, twisted, half-sided - the dynamic where Hod feared Gebura, and Gebura didn’t think Hod ran her department worth a damn, but they were both just competent enough to not ever devolve into any open hostility or jabs or spite. (Not while they were in the same room, at least. She has no illusions Gebura didn’t speak poorly of her when Hod wasn’t around to hear.) This is something different.

This is respect, and acknowledgement, and a light that’s blossoming inside Hod’s chest as she looks at someone she respects and doesn’t back down. This moment of silence could be a lot of things. 

Gebura laughs and turns, beginning to walk, and her gesture is almost flippant. Her laugh sets butterflies in Hod’s stomach, making her feel lighter-than-air. Gebura _respects_ her, unironically, for real -- maybe there are things they’ll never agree on, but this can be the start of something. “Yeah, sure. You don’t know where Haru’s locker even _is_ , though, do you? And if you’re just wandering all the way around the entire department looking for it, you’ll take forever. It’s this way - I’ll show you.” She snorts. “And if you have to hand off any more transfer paperwork, you’d better remember where they are. It’d be a pain to take the time to remind you _again_.”

 _It’d be a pain to take the time to remind you again_ \- this is something. This is Gebura admitting she _would_ do it again, and that she doesn’t hate it. Hod is familiar with what half-hidden spite sounds like, and it doesn’t sound like this.

She wants to take Gebura’s hand, but she doesn’t. That would probably be... a little much.

Instead she settles for following, and talking, trying to tease out the things that Gebura will talk about freely that are untainted by that ugly-brittle feeling she still remembers. And Gebura _answers._ Gebura is tentative about it, in the way of someone who’s used to being so much more private, but. It’s nice. It feels good.

When Hod finds an excuse to ask about Haru the next morning, to talk with Gebura, she thinks she could get used to these conversations and the way they make her heart feel like fizzy champagne in a way she doesn’t understand yet. She will, though. She will understand it. It might take her a long time -- but maybe that’s what being a better person is.

Work, and will, and time. And maybe -- the desire to find something that makes you happy. 

* * *

It’s still strange for Gebura to have skin, and everything that goes with it. A lot of how she always differentiated _before_ and _now_ was -- _before,_ she was Kali, she was the Red Mist; she bled and she fought and she ripped and tore for her cause. She protected, foremost; at the start, she’d never bite anything unless it bit her first. And the blood on her teeth, now only half-remembered, like a good dream she’d tried too hard to hold onto when she’d woken up.

And _now_ was Gebura, in a cold metal body that couldn’t touch, that didn’t tire or feel pain; she would overclock herself until things started to break, and then she would go again, and _again_ , because this undying body meant she was... too similar, to the Abnormalities. Because if she ever died, broke down all the way, Angela would just wind her up like a clockwork toy and spin her back like a film reel and put another Gebura back in her place to run the department.

But as long as she didn’t focus on the hard reality of it, she could pretend she had a human shape, even if not a truly human body, even if it was still something that could have parts replaced and repaired infinitely to never die -- she could pretend so hard that it generated something inside her chassis, made of blood and fury, the _her_ that she felt like but didn’t see in the mirror. Someone recognizable in body and soul as the woman who’d been the Red Mist. (Or, as she heard Myo hollering over someone’s radio, voice sharp as any sword and piercing as any bullet, _that bitch is the Red Mist_. It was flattering, in a fucked-up kind of way. An acknowledgement she wasn’t supposed to have overheard.)

When she puts it that way, it sounds like some kind of poetic shit. She’s not a poetic kind of woman. Leave that to the other Sephirah. More martial things have always held her interest better; she wants _impact_ and _clash_ , she wants her actions to feel _meaningful_ \- and writing down words on a page or on a screen just doesn’t give that feedback. They don’t let her _move_ like that. She has no immediate feedback the way she did when she was the Red Mist; not from suppressions, and not from Carmen and the team’s experiments. It’s just words, and she’s never been good at writing reports or essays or employee reviews. By this point she doesn’t even feel too mad about it -- she has her talents, and those aren’t in that group.

Then again, she does run this floor of the Library now, so maybe it’s all some kind of elaborate joke at her expense. But fuck, how was she supposed to know that Angela wouldn’t only _resurrect_ all of them after the Seed went bad, she’d give them _jobs_ ? Who the hell knows what goes on in that woman’s head nowadays, honestly.

(Roland, maybe. But something tells Gebura that not even Angela is totally conscious of what goes on in Angela’s head. That’s what the floor realizations are for, right? From what she can tell - which ain’t that much - they’re sort of like the Sephirah Meltdowns back in the corporation had been, for most of the other Sephirah. Like some sort of dreamlike fantasy state, letting all of your darkest wants and wills out.

It hadn’t been like that for her; she’d just been... pissed off. The pinnacle of all her aimless fury, compressed into shape, and overriding the will of her stolen E.G.O with her own desires.)

(She’s always been good at wielding E.G.O and maximizing its potential, better than any damn Agent in that place could ever hope to be. Even the ‘fully extracted’ Mimicry that was kept in the Armory, for the strongest agents -- any of them wielding that thing would do maybe half of what she could do with hers. Maybe it was overriding them? But she’s never been overridden by hers. She’ll _make_ this thing do as she wants -- even if it sways her a little. Not enough to change her course.)

Anyways. Not like her Realization had let her into the know of what was going on in Angela’s head. She understands Roland better, now, but she’d been -- half-hoping to get a view into Angela’s thoughts. To see if anything in this red-hot landscape brought out any hints of Carmen, who Angela had never been; she’s not even in love with Carmen anymore, not like that, but sometimes she wants to _know_ \--

She isn’t gonna get to know. Carmen died a long time ago, and nowadays when Gebura examines the tattered old thread of Kali’s love, she can almost find things to be suspicious about there.

But today she’s got business, so she can’t just lounge around and smoke; one of Hod’s assistant Librarians wants a Book she’s keeping on her floor, one of those special used-to-be-a-guest books instead of the damn mounds of “normal” books, and due to something-or-other (Gebura wasn’t paying attention) it means she’s got to take the thing down herself. Not too far of a walk, as it stands, although sometimes parts of the Library shift and change on her and she only ever realizes retroactively. It’s like the building has got a mind of its own.

(Does it? God, but she hopes it isn’t the Manager stuck in the walls like some kind of... _genius loci_ , is the term. Regardless of her feelings on the man, both as Kali and as Gebura, she doesn’t think she’d wish that on too many people, and he’s not exactly one of them.)

Hod’s been - different, kind of, since. Since everything went down. She used to be meek as a mouse, weak as anything; nice, sure, but second-guessing and passive-aggressive about it, when Gebura has always been _aggressive_ (no passive). But since that meltdown, and even since Lobotomy Corporation was destroyed and replaced with the Library, she’s been... stronger. Not physically or anything -- without the help of the books, Gebura doubts Hod could even _lift_ Mimicry, let alone _swing_ it - but emotionally, mentally. She’s gone from stuttering and always seeming half-about to cry to a woman who looks for a brighter future.

And Gebura can’t help herself but admire that; she can’t help but admire the way Hod has picked herself up and decided to reinforce her spine with steel, to temper herself into something and someone that she can be proud of.

So: Language to Literature. There’s no Literature without Language, right? Something like that. It’s not like the floors are interconnected the way the departments used to be, back when this was a Wing and not a Library. But Gebura can make her way around without taking too much time, when she bothers poking her head out of her floor.

The Floor of Literature is in the middle of a reception. That’s fine. Gebura can wait; she’s got the book sitting docile in her pocket, even if the sound of clashing metal is... tempting. Even if standing around with nothing to keep her hands busy - no sword, no cigarette, no nothing - is making her shift her weight from foot to foot.

...Ah, forget it. She’s just going to get a peek at it. It’s nobody special, anyways, if she recognizes the voices and cries correctly; some poor schmucks she originally received and beat to death some other day, dragged back out of their books so Angela can try to get an extra copy of their stories. Some gang that doesn’t even get the honor of having their own, individual names on the covers of their books.

And as she gets closer, peeks her head in, there’s a cut-off sob and the sound of pages settling to the floor -- and another -- and a third. The librarians are darting back and forth, sheathing weapons, settling back into their positions even as the Floor resets itself, their clothing shifting and fading into orange cardigan and dark-grey pants as the need for borrowed power ends; Hod is settling a long blade back behind her hips, letting the black suit and white cape shimmer back to her familiar outfit as the Patron Librarian.

Actually -- is that Summer and Haru, wiping their cardigans free of imagined dirt? Gebura remembers them both, although it’s not as if she was best friends with them. Haru transferred out after only a week, trading places in Disciplinary with Summer, and Summer was.. devoted to proper procedure. In the Disciplinary Department’s fashion, that translated to surgical precision when suppressing abnormalities. She’d never say it out loud, exactly, but it’s good to see assistant librarians she _knows_ ; most of the ones on the first set of floors are natives to their departments, people who never spent any real time working in Briah.

They’re finishing up with getting things set away in any case, so Gebura lifts one arm in an effortless wave, like she’s too good to say _hello_. The surprise on Hod’s face is almost comedic. What did she think, that Gebura was going to make her wait for this one single book? Maybe she did. It’s not like the Patron Librarians manually run these things back and forth, even if it’s the ones they’ve decided to use personally, but - Gebura wanted to see Hod. It’s been a while. She misses the chats they had, back before the end, when Hod would find excuses to be in Disciplinary and they would just... talk, without any weight or consequence. Two women acknowledging their -- something. Whatever it was. The knowledge that being better was _possible_ , even if it looked unlikely.

“Hey,” Gebura says, instead of any of the thoughts going through her head, and “I’ve got your book. Are you going to come over here and get it, or do I need to toss it?” She mimes throwing it in a lazy arc; one of the assistant librarians moves as if to catch it, and trips over their own feet instead, flashing Hod a thumbs-up after their poorly-handled recovery to prevent their face from hitting the floor. Well, let it never be said Gebura isn’t without mercy, because she manages to not snort at it; these people are entirely comfortable doing backflips and sprinting straight across the floor in three seconds flat during a reception, but the moment they’ve no longer got the books powering them up they’re just strange and a little unfortunate. Children of the Backstreets or Nest-raised, _that_ stays the same among everyone who reached a certain rank within Lobotomy Corporation; the trait is shared with high-level fixers as well. The more dangerous someone becomes when all the stakes are in play, the more harmless they often appear when there’s no risk at hand.

“Oh!” Hod doesn’t blush, but it’s a near thing, given the surprised spike of her voice; she turns gracefully and smiles, bright-eyed, still a little sweaty. “...You surprised me -” she’s already walking, still a little off-balance from her fight but rapidly regaining equilibrium - “I wasn’t expecting you until later.”

Gebura doesn’t _huff_. She’s got some dignity. It’s not as if she’s fully at her best after she’s completed a battle, besides, no matter how simple it might have been. “I would’ve waited, but observing the end of the reception felt like a better prospect than making you waste time you could be using to attune to this thing.” She does toss the book, then; the other woman is close enough that the throw is only a couple of feet long, and Hod’s catch happens without even a single fumble - she looks down, checks that it’s the book she was expecting, and tucks it away with a nod of appreciation. Not a single stutter or intentional aversion of her eyes, and Gebura feels a fierce sort of pride at it. “Very efficient. You’d pass for a high-ranked fixer, if you could manage even some of it without the book itself.”

“You would have to teach me! Most of it _is_ the book, after all.” _And the combat training Angela downloaded into our brains_ , but that goes unsaid. Gebura hasn’t had much need of it, except for right after she awakened in truth and had to shake the dust out of her limbs, not quite used to the weight of real flesh yet or the reality of being able to bleed. “Now that the Library is free of receptions that I’m responsible for managing for the next few hours... “

Beat. 

“I was wondering if I could meet your assistants?”

It’s an excuse as much as anything, but Gebura will take it. In that sleep-without-dreaming that she slept in until the Floor of Language revealed itself to everyone else, she watched the rest of the Library unfold and evolve; even without her recognizing Summer and Haru as agents who were part of her team as a Sephirah, every face has a name sitting at the tip of her tongue. She knows it like she’d know a story someone else told her.

And Hod knows that. Of course Hod knows that. But for all that Hod unironically, truthfully enjoys training others and organizing others, she can’t do much of that in the Library -- the books give a librarian everything they need.

Hell. Gebura did enjoy those early-morning discussions, back before everything turned completely upside down, and Hod’s actively creating a reason why she _should_ come down to the Floor of Language and spend some time. It’s not like Gebura is going to say _no._

She doesn’t say no this time. Maybe she’ll say it sometime in the future, when people who she used to care for are passing through the Library, and she can’t help but half-grieve for women that Kali knew better than Gebura ever did. But today? Today she has time for Hod, and she’s going to enjoy that time.

The City is a hard place. The Library, for all that it’s brought them back to life, is still the inverted continuation of Lobotomy Corporation -- and Lobotomy Corporation killed Kali, the same way it killed Michelle, killed Elijah, killed Daniel, killed all of them. This won’t last, almost definitely.

But she’ll enjoy it while she can, and she’ll believe in it while she can. 

It’s the only way Gebura really knows how to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from A's dialogue after Gebura's core suppression:  
>  _The tale of how she built her reputation could fill a chronicle of history books and then some. The only problem was that Carmen was too wrapped up with taking care of others. She never had a moment to take good care of herself. We were on such a delightful upturn back then, it’s almost cruel to bring those memories back up. We were flying towards a limitless world that never seemed to end._  
>  (Edited 02/14/21 to add linebreaks -- this thing was illegible on mobile, the textblocks were huge, and now it's more legible and they're smaller.)


End file.
